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Which Is Better, Adblock Or Adblock Plus?

Posted by Soulskill on from the who-blacklists-the-blacklisters dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Wladimir Palant is the creator of the Adblock Plus browser extension, but he often gets asked how it compares to a similar extension for Chrome called Adblock. In the past, he's told people the two extensions achieve largely the same end, but in slightly different ways. However, recent changes to the Adblock project have him worried. "AdBlock covertly moved from an open development model towards hiding changes from its users. Users were neither informed about that decision nor the reasons behind it." He goes through the changelog and highlights some updates that call into question the integrity of Adblock. For example, from an update on June 6th: "Calling home functionality has been extended. It now sends user's locale in addition to the unique user ID, AdBlock version, operating system and whether Google Search ads are being allowed. Also, AdBlock will tell getadblock.com (or any other website if asked nicely) whether AdBlock has just been installed or has been used for a while — again, in addition to the unique user ID." Of course, Palant has skin in this game, and Adblock Plus has dealt with fallout from their "acceptable ads policy," but at least it's still developed in the open.

14 of 436 comments (clear)

  1. None of them. by Badooleoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Adblock Edge

    1. Re:None of them. by Luckyo · · Score: 5, Informative

      Adblock Edge is Adblock Plus without the checkbox on the first page of options menu to enable/disable acceptable ads.

      It's literally the exactly same thing in all other aspects of it.

    2. Re:None of them. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      edge sounds cooler. someone needs to make an "Adblock Edge: Bismuth Edition" with every blacklist enabled.

    3. Re:None of them. by Badooleoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Even better is to redirect hosts on the router so it applies to the whole network.

      New clients on the network (such as friends and family when they come over) would be covered too.

    4. Re: None of them. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This.

    5. Re:None of them. by Luckyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You'll have to explain in great detail why he, who made his white listing process extremely transparent and even allowed users to vote on it, he who kept his add-on fully open source and under permissive license that allows you to fork it. And he who unlike those who forked it, actually continues to work on developing the add-on, while allowing you to completely turn off all of monetization functions with a single check box on first page of options is somehow "can't be trusted now". If you are this paranoid, then how could you trust him in the past? Surely you had no way of knowing back then what his monetization scheme was, and it was far more likely to be something really insidious rather than benign "just uncheck this box once and you're good" that it is today.

      So tell me. Why should I not trust him. Be specific, and try no to sink into the old "but turned the monetization options on by default when he implemented them (and I won't tell you that he actually warned you about it upon installation because that goes against the message I'm trying to deliver), that makes him completely untrustworthy" hyperbole. You'll also have to tell me who offers an alternative that is actually developing the add on. Whoever forked Adblock Edge is certainly not that person. It's still stuck in previous version of Adblock Plus apparently, because whoever forked it couldn't even be bothered to update his fork by copy pasting code from new version.

  2. Chrome? by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The real question is: If you value privacy and dislike ads, why would you ever use Chrome?

    The entire goal of that browser is counter to user Privacy and choice. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, if you don't care about that stuff then I'd same Chrome is probably the best browser out there. But I do value those things, and in fact they are probably my #1 consideration when choosing a browser so I use Firefox despite its many faults.

    1. Re:Chrome? by asmkm22 · · Score: 4, Informative

      uTorrent IS malware these days. Try installing it without unchecking all the extra crap that gets bundled with it, then come back here and tell me why it shouldn't be flagged.

    2. Re:Chrome? by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But I do value those things, and in fact they are probably my #1 consideration when choosing a browser so I use Firefox despite its many faults.

      So are you 100% google free? No Android, no Google browser, no Gmail?

      The reason I ask is because when I type something into the Firefox search bar in it's default configuration, shortly after it will appear as a suggested search in Chrome's universal address bar.

      It's not Chrome leaking user data.

    3. Re:Chrome? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Chrome is by design a tool to report your browsing to Google. Why else should they spend money in it ?

      It began with Chrome Sync, which sends home your bookmarks, tabs and... passwords, and became better with the "Reduce data usage" option, which directs all your web browsing traffic to Google servers for analysis.

      If Google created it, it IS meant to get data about you and sell it afterward, like any other Google creation.

  3. Or, use a big hosts file by drooling-dog · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't use Adblock, but I've been using this for years. I rarely see an ad unless it's served directly from the site I'm visiting, and it blocks a lot of malware as well. It has something like 16,000 entries, but doesn't seem to slow things down at all.

  4. Should I do an ad blocker? by Animats · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm behind Ad Limiter, which limits Google search ads to one per page, picking the best one based on SiteTruth ratings. You can set it for zero search ads if you like. It also puts SiteTruth ratings on Google search results. It's a demo for SiteTruth search spam filtering.

    This Mozilla/Chrome add on has a general ad-blocking mechanism inside. Unlike most ad blockers, it's not based on regular expressions looking for specific HTML. It finds URLs known to lead to ads, works outward through the DOM to find the ad boundary, then deletes the ad. So it's relatively insensitive to changes in ad code, and doesn't require much maintenance. The same code processes search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Bleeko, DuckDuckGo, and Infoseek. (Coming soon, Yandex support, and better handling of Google ads within ads, where an ad has multiple links.)

    So, if I wanted to do a better ad blocker, I could do so easily. Should I? Is another one really needed? Are the headaches of running one worth it?

  5. Mu by sootman · · Score: 5, Informative

    /etc/hosts

    Install once, update if you care to, but it's not essential. Requires no configuration after installation, works for ALL browsers on your system with no setup, does not require the browser to "support" it in any way (i.e., extensions), never ever gets broken by browser updates, works on ancient computers with grossly out-of-date browsers. Works with ANY tcp/ip-based app on your system, really, so it lowers vectors for IM apps, Acrobat, etc.

    The first computer I used it on was an 800 MHz G3 iBook with 640 MB RAM. Some people may say a large hosts file will slow down your computer, but I've never seen that happen myself in over a decade of using it on literally every computer I have.

    It may not block EVERY ad like a dedicated extension does, but it comes really really close, and I like the fact that it works with all browsers and never requires updating. When I get a new computer, I put the hosts file on and pretty much never touch it again. A handful of sites (like hulu) will not work with an adblocker and it's a manual process to edit the file, but for unix types, that's not a problem. It blocks google's sponsored links so you may need to take that out too, for people who google "sears" and click the first (sponsored) link instead of the first actual link.

    No reason not to do security in layers and use it WITH adblocking extensions, I suppose, but I've never felt the need to.

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  6. Re:Reject all proprietary software and "choice" to by sd4f · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But there is a strong misconception that android is still FOSS. The phrase that comes to mind is the rug has been pulled from under them. I was surprised to learn to what lengths google has gone to lock down android. It was certainly a huge reason as to why a lot of the tech sector was pushing android in the early days (nothing gets the tech sector weaker in the knees than FOSS). While you are right, that users don't care, google has performed a massive bait and switch.